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The Garden of Survival

by

Algernon Blackwood

I

IT will surprise and at the same time possibly amuse you to know that
I had the instinct to tell what follows to a Priest, and might have
done so had not the Man of the World in me whispered that from
professional Believers I should get little sympathy, and probably
less credence still. For to have my experience disbelieved, or
attributed to hallucination, would be intolerable to me. Psychical
investigators, I am told, prefer a Medium who takes no cash
recompense for his performance, a Healer who gives of his strange
powers without reward. There are, however, natural born priests who
yet wear no uniform other than upon their face and heart, but since I
know of none I fall back upon yourself, my other half, for in writing
this adventure to you I almost feel that I am writing it to myself.

The desire for confession is upon me: this thing must out. It is a
story, though an unfinished one. I mention this at once lest,
frightened by the thickness of the many pages, you lay them aside
against another time, and so perhaps neglect them altogether. A
story, however, will invite your interest, and when I add that it is
true, I feel that you will bring sympathy to that interest: these
together, I hope, may win your attention, and hold it, until you
shall have read the final word.

That I should use this form in telling it will offend your literary
taste you who have made your name both as critic and creative
writer for you said once, I remember, that to tell a story in
epistolary form is a subterfuge, an attempt to evade the difficult
matters of construction and delineation of character. My story,
however, is so slight, so subtle, so delicately intimate too, that a
letter to some one in closest sympathy with myself seems the only
form that offers.

It is, as I said, a confession, but a very dear confession: I burn to
tell it honestly, yet know not how. To withhold it from you would be
to admit a secretiveness that our relationship has never known out
it must, and to you. I may, perhaps, borrow who can limit the
sharing powers of twin brothers like ourselves? some of the skill
your own work spills so prodigally, crumbs from your writing table,
so to speak; and you will forgive the robbery, if successful, as you
will accept lie love behind the confession as your due.

Now, listen, please! For this is the point: that, although my wife is
dead these dozen years and more I have found reunion and I love.
Explanation of this must follow as best it may. So, please mark tie
point which for the sake of emphasis I venture to repeat: that I know
reunion and I love.

With the jealous prerogative of the twin, you objected to that
marriage, though I knew that it deprived you of no jot of my
affection, owing to the fact that it was prompted by pity only,
leaving the soul in me wholly disengaged. Marion, by her steady
refusal to accept my honest friendship, by her persistent admiration
of me, as also by her loveliness, her youth, her singing, persuaded
me somehow finally that I needed her. The cry of the flesh, which
her beauty stimulated and her singing increased most strangely,
seemed raised into a burning desire that I mistook at the moment for
the true desire of the soul. Yet, actually, the soul in me remained
aloof, a spectator, and one, moreover, of a distinctly lukewarm kind.
It was very curious. On looking back, I can hardly understand it even
now; there seemed some special power, some special undiscovered tie
between us that led me on and yet deceived me. It was especially
evident in her singing, this deep power. She sang, you remember, to
her own accompaniment on the harp, and her method, though so simple
it seemed almost childish, was at the same time charged with a great
melancholy that always moved me most profoundly. The sound of her
small, plaintive voice, the sight of her slender fingers that plucked
the strings in some delicate fashion native to herself, the tiny foot
that pressed the pedal all these, with her dark searching eyes fixed
penetratingly upon my own while she sang of love and love's
endearments, combined in a single stroke of very puissant and
seductive kind... Continue reading book >>